Have you ever read a blog posting from a someone, with photos and a nice summary of something they’ve experienced? Or read something that they wanted to share or discuss? And then thought: “Gee, I want to to that.”

But then you’ve realised that you don’t want all the hassle of setting up a blog, dealing with design, maybe a domain and a lot of administration? Well, there’s no need to be jealous of your blogging friends anymore. You can become a blogger in less than 2 minutes! Because you already have a ready to use blog tool: Facebook!

Where can you find it?

It’s a bit of a hidden feature if you don’t know about it. Sure, sometimes you will see a Facebook posting in your news feed from one of your friends that opens in a bigger window when you click on it, and which contains a title, a photo and formatted text. But surprisingly few use this function.

In the web browser you find the notes at the adress www.facebook.com/notes . To find notes (notater på norsk) on the cell phone, search for notes in the search field on in the Facebook app. The notes app will show up and you can click on it:

No matter what of these two options you choose, you will now get to a page that lists all the notes of your friends. These notes are like blog postings:

Like your Facebook news stream, they are not listed chronologically. I haven’t found any way to sort them like that, if you do know any solution, feel free to leave a comment below.

To read a note, you either click on it’s title or the See more link. As you can see, a note can look like any normal blog posting:

To close the notes you just hit the Esc button on your keyboard, or the x in the upper right corner.

How to create your own

So, would you like to write your own? That’s easy!

You can create your own notes on both the mobile app as well as in the web browser. This recipe is for the web browser, but the principle is the same for both, even if there are fewer options for the cell phone app.

At the top of the facebook.com/notes page you find this button:

Click on it, and the form for creating a note opens up:

You can now add a top photo (please do, it makes it much more inviting to read your note) and a title. And then you can start writing in the main rich text field.

To the left of the rich text field you have two icons. The right icon let’s you choose various types of formatting like headings, lists and quotations:

You can also add photos by clicking on the plus sign:

At bottom left of the note form, you have a button called Delete. Click on that if you don’t want to save or publish the note.

At the bottom right of the form you have the following buttons:

Audience: This is the button to the left. Here is where you choose your audience. Do you want only your friends to see this (or a subset of them) or do you want this note to be public for all to see? If you want to start a blog with a big readership, choosing Public is the way to go.

Save: Click on this if you need to save the note, but you don’t want to publish right now. Click on the x in the upper right corner to close the note.

Publish: Click on this when you are ready to publish it.

See all your notes and drafts

In the upper right corner on the www.facebook.com/notes page you will find two menu items:

My notes: This will give you a view of all your published notes. You can use this to go back to them if you want to edit them or delete them.

My drafts: This will give you a view of all your unpublished notes. You can use this to go back and finish them and publish them.

IBM finally released IBM Verse on the world back in April, after much hype beforehand. In short: IBM Verse started out as IBM Notes 10 but evolved into a web mail client which offers a whole new way to sort, search and keep track of emails, appointments, contacts and content. This video gives a nice demonstration:

I’ve got an IBM Verse account, but since it’s not integrated into our solutions at work, nor with my private email, I really haven’t used it that much. The strength of IBM Verse is that it’s tightly integrated with IBM Connections and IBM Sametime. All are tools that we use at our company.

At work we are using IBM Notes 9.0.1 for a lot of things, including email and calendar. However, I’ve been testing the Outlook 2016 client, and it blows Notes mail out of the water. It’s really, really good. Outlook calendar has been better than the Notes calendar for years, but even the email part is now quite excellent in Outlook. Also the web version, not to mention the mobile app, are very good.

Why am I mentioning this? Because the integration between Outlook, Skype for business, Sharepoint and other solutions, combined with their new mobile client will make it even harder for IBM to both counter the moving that a lot of companies are doing from IBM to Microsoft. It will also be much harder to convince new customers to move over to IBM.

In that light, it’s not a smart move to:

1) Not deliver what we were promised with Verse (as this article from Red Pill points out).
2) Still use the standard web version of the calendar instead of the new Verse interface.

No matter how much I love Domino and old IBM products, the world is moving on. And I’m an atheist when it comes to my tools. If MS comes up with a better client, with a good mobile app as well as a nice web interface, I can’t keep my users in the dark. Especially now that we are moving our Notes applications to the web, where we only use the .nsf files for data storage while the web interface are running on other platforms. We are also contemplating moving from Sametime to Lyn…sorry…Skype for business, but IBM is actually doing an effort to keep us on Sametime.

IBM has a lot of challenges ahead. IBM Verse shows good promise, but promise ware is not good enough. The only reason Microsoft got away with promise ware for so long was that they managed to get into a monopoly situation in a time where that was actually possible.

I’ve pimped my Notes client and I change colors, depending on the season. Click to see a larger version

Sometimes you just got to have some fun with your work tools. I like to pimp my Notes client with the help of Panagenda’s Marvel Client: Skinning Edition. This makes it possible for me set my company’s logo as the background for my workspace in my Notes client, as well as changing the database icons. You can download the files and instructions here, but be warned, this might be overwritten by your administrator. It depends on how your setup is.

In addition, I’ve installed the Eclipse plugin called Themes for Lotus Notes. Just follow the instructions, and you will be able to do like me, change the color of your Client, depending on the season. And since it’s summer now, at least according to the calendar, my Notes client these days is green.

I attended the ISBG (IBM samhandling brukergruppe), formerly known as the Norwegian Lotus user group, at Farris bad (a spa and hotel) in Larvik on Wednesday and Thursday. This was the first time I attended the group’s meeting, even if my previous employers have been members.

I didn’t get to see much of Larvik, but the hotel, Farris bad, was a really nice place. My room was directly above the sea, and I fell asleep, and woke up to the sound of waves crashing onto the shore and beach.

From Lotus Notes to IBM’s Platform for Social Busniess – the journey continues

Farris bad

Michael Wuerdemann from IBM started his presentation by showing a commercial from IBM about their commitment to social business. When the video ended, the Lotus logo appeared. This took quite a few people by surprise, but that’s when the ball was dropped: The commercial was ten years old.

Michael did this to show that IBM’s commitment to social is not something new, they’ve been focusing on this for a long time. He then showed IBM’s newest commercial. It’s not half as catchy as Microsoft ‘s commercial for Windows 8, but the point is that IBM is thinking social solutions, and not technology and platforms.

He pointed out that users are used to social tools in their private life, and that they expect this at their workplace as well. The problem, he said, is that workers are often ahead of their companies, and they start sharing business sensitive information on Facebook, Yammer and other social networks. IBM’s solutions can meet this problem.

Of course he also mentioned IBM’s cloud business, which also has a center in the EU now. IBM gives you the possibility to either run your own private cloud on your premises, or normal cloud computing.

He then moved on to comparisons between Notes/Domino vs Micosofts’s solutions. IBM has finally coughed up the Domino Migration tool for migrating from Exchange to Domino, but I haven’t heard non biased information about this tool yet. It will also be possible to use REST to access Notes databases. Maybe I misunderstood him on this, and it’s already possible. I haven’t tried it, but if true, it’s certainly a huge leap forward.

Before the break he talked about how Quickr had been an attempt to meet the bad feedback Files got in IBM Connections, something I myself have complained about (look for a future blog posting about this). This had been a mistake, according to Michael, and now that Quickr is shut down, Content Manager for Connections is what IBM will offer Quickr customers.

A Day in the Life of an IBM-er
After the break he showed us how an IBM-er works with Connections, and how Social Mail makes it easy to integrate Notes with Connections. I saw to my great satisfaction that everything he showed us are tools and methods we use at Brunvoll every day.

Teamstudio Unplugged
Arshad Khalid of Teamstudio showed us some very impressive mobile solutions for Notes databases. This is where I want Brunvoll to go. The possibility for working offline, and then synchronize any changes back into production, is something that we are in severe need of. Especially since our offline replication has become very complicated.

As Easy as Lego – Put it All Together Using a Widget Framework on Domino
Henrik Winkel from Opus Neo demonstrated the Neo dashboard, and how you can utilize and construct Widgets from sources like Notes applications, RSS feeds, blogs, video and IBM Connection. This is stuff I know quite a lot about, but it was nice to get a demo of the dashboard product.

Back to the Future: Understand and Optimize Your IBM Notes and Domino Infrastructure
I like Panagenda and their products, and I’m planning to test the Marvel Client in for pushing out Notes clients and policies.

The presentation was solid and about how you should go through your current infrastructure before planning for the future.

ISBG CSI4.0: What now? – Info and Team Activity for Everyone
First we were treated to a slightly confusing horror film about who killed Lotus, something that would have gone well together with my “RIP Lotus” badge. I’m not quite sure what the movie had to do with the assignments we were given.

The assignments were fun, though, and one member of my team surprised me with the facial recognition app on his Iphone. It recognized a young Freddie Mercury based on not much more than Mercury’s right eye. Impressive.

Spa & Relax
We now had two hours where we could enjoy the spa, something I didn’t. I went to the gym and lifted weigts before dinner. Maybe next time.

Dinner
We were treated to a three course dinner that was delicious. The prizes from the competition was handed out, and I just don’t understand how the points were calculated, considering that my team had answered more questions than the three teams that won. I think I’ll have to check the bank statements of that jury…

After several hours of magic tricks, good food and nice company, I threw in the towel around one o’clock. I fell asleep to, and woke up to, the waves hitting the beach. Wonderful.

Aren’t there times when you are looking through your Notes calendar and you wish that public holidays could be marked, so that you don’t accidentally book meetings on days that no one is at work? At least here in Europe that’s a problem, what with all our public holidays. And if you work at a company that have branches all over the world, or as in the case of my company, employees are travelling all over the world to meet people, it’s often useful to see when other countries have their holidays.

This is how you import holidays into your Notes calendar:

Open your personal calendar inside Notes

Above your calendar, next to the New button, you have a More button. Click it and choose Import Holidays…

This screen will pop up:

You can choose to import the holiday of any country in the list by checking the check box to the left of the name of the country. In this example I’ve chosen Norway:

Now all the Norwegian holidays will be imported. To check this I go to December to see if the public Xmas holidays have been set

The Norwegian constitutional day is also in place:

Also holidays that occur on different dates each year is in place. Here’s Easter:

This is how easy it is to have full control over holidays, both in your own country, and other countries. This is of
course also replicated over to your cell phone if you wish.